Tangible functional programming

  • Authors:
  • Conal M. Elliott

  • Affiliations:
  • LambdaPix, San Andreas, CA

  • Venue:
  • ICFP '07 Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We present a user-friendly approach to unifying program creation and execution, based on a notion of "tangible values" (TVs), which are visual and interactive manifestations of pure values, including functions. Programming happens by gestural composition of TVs. Our goal is to give end-users the ability to create parameterized, composable content without imposing the usual abstract and linguistic working style of programmers. We hope that such a system will put the essence of programming into the hands of many more people, and in particular people with artistic/visual creative style. In realizing this vision, we develop algebras for visual presentation and for "deep" function application, where function and argument may both be nested within a structure of tuples, functions, etc. Composition gestures are translated into chains of combinators that act simultaneously on statically typed values and their visualizations.